New features of Word 2016

One of the world's most popular text editors – Microsoft Word – has benefited from more updates than you may have noticed. It means more features focus on usability for the end-users. Being aware of these new updates can aid you in improving your documents and reports in an easier and more efficient way. The most recent updates are the “Welcome Back” and “Smart Lookup” which we will have a look in this blog post.

Welcome Back

Now with ‘Welcome Back’ you can return to the part of a document you last worked on. This is great feature for long documents or reports where you might be working on several sections of a file at a time. The new feature will appear in your document when you open it again as shown below.

Smart Lookup

Another feature is ‘Smart Lookup’, it came in 2013 but for 2016 it is also available in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. Smart lookup allows you to select a word and find out more information on it. It is also ‘contextual’, if I write ‘open plan office’ and select ‘office’ smart lookup will find you items on offices, such as photographs and definitions. Whereas if I write ‘new office applications’ and select ‘office’ it finds items relevant to Office as software, rather than office as a location.

To see the feature, you need to click with the right button on the word that you want to activate the function. After that you can see the smart lookup feature as the pictures below.



After that on the right side of your document the findings will appear as the example below. When you access for the very first time note that you must turn on the feature. 

Microsoft Word 2016 came also with other features, such as Open/Save a file directly to the Cloud (SharePoint / OneDrive), Share a file from within Word and Real-time Co-authoring on files, which it is also a good help when you are working in long reports with your co-workers.

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